SiteCrime, fifth floor, Uniment & Poe: a slow morning. Bars of light from the slatted window blinds fell like weight across the policewoman’s shoulders. Shadow operators clustered viscously in the ceiling corners. (Once or twice a week, the ghost of her old employer could also be seen there. This apparition had been less use to her than she hoped. It consisted only of a face — the face of the older Albert Einstein like a photograph under water, its eyes distended, its mouth opening and closing senselessly — which seemed to be warning her against something.) Her desk was heavy with reports.
In Saudade City, topology itself is the crime. While the rest of the planet can offer nothing more bizarre than rape or murder, SiteCrime — the frail human attempt to bring order to a zone which cannot be understood — must deal with boundary-shifts, abrupt fogs of hallucination, a daily illegal traffic in and out of the event site — people, memes and artifacts no one can quite describe. The assistant busied herself with these puzzles. Bells rang faintly in the distance. At approximately eleven forty, shouting could be heard in the corridor outside and she was called to one of the basement interrogation rooms. Two or three days ago, atrocities had occurred down there under cover of a nanocamera outage only now repaired. The fifth floor was alive with accounts, substantiated and otherwise. ‘It smells like fresh meat,’ someone reported; someone else said it was like war had broken out in their building.
Everyone, anyway, wanted a piece of it. Alarms were going off. In-house fire teams, weighed down with hand-held thermobarics and bandoliers of Chambers ammunition, grinned out of every lift. The assistant took the stairs. Halfway down, something so strange happened she never reached the basement. An emergency door opened on to the echoing stairwell in front of her and the figure of a woman emerged on to the landing. She was tall, built, shaven-headed, looking back over her shoulder, finishing a sentence with a word that sounded like ‘Pearlent.’ At that, the assistant raised her hand. ‘Stop!’ she called. Her tailoring launched but would not come up to operating speed: instead, she saw the world at a subtle wrong angle, as if she was someone else, with annunciative light pouring in a dazzle down the stairwell. The figure turned towards her, mouth open in a laugh she couldn’t interpret, and whispered, ‘Don’t jump, babe!’ Half blind and full of inexplicable dread, she watched it vanish round the next turn in the stairs. Footsteps hurried away. Lower down, a door boomed closed. Nothing else. The assistant sat down, breathing heavily, nauseous with waste chemicals from her own overdriven systems. They had not been interdicted from outside; they had simply become emotional and confused. They were all right now.
She left the building, and later turned up at Sharp Cuts, a downscale tailor parlour on Straint, where the owner, who had made his way to Saudade City after an accident in an Uncle Zip franchise nearer the Galactic core, took one look at her and said:
‘I can’t do anything for someone like you.’ At the same time, his clients that morning — half a dozen gun- kiddies from the beach enclaves of Suicide Point, in for a midprice growth blocker called
‘Try,’ she said.
He would look at anything but her — out the window, all around his storefront. His own hormones had come up in some half-forgotten response. He was trying not to feel helpless. ‘I’ve seen you up and down the street,’ he said. ‘This stuff of yours, it isn’t just some franchise job.’ She smiled and asked him his name, which he gave as George. She said he shouldn’t talk himself down. He was just the expert she needed. She said she thought she might have an ion channel problem. ‘You should go to Preter Coeur,’ he tried to persuade her. ‘Here we just do the cheap bolt-ons.’ She made him meet her eyes. He went and found a six-regime loupe, which looked like a child’s stereopsis toy from the deep historical times, and she jumped up on one of his cutting tables where he could insert probes.
‘I don’t get most of this,’ he said after a minute or two. ‘I’d be scared and confused, I met you on the street.’
‘George, you’re scared and confused in here.’
‘Keep still,’ he cautioned her. ‘Jesus,’ he said, after a minute more. ‘They wired everything through the amygdala. You ever act without knowing why? Cry a lot? Use metaphors? Who did this to you?’ He poked around in her ion channels. ‘Forget I asked that,’ he said. He said she could get up, she might feel as if she had low blood sugar for a time. It wouldn’t be much. ‘You got Kv12.2 expression issues. When they tuned the neuronal gates for spatial perception, they put Kv12.2 on a hair trigger. Every so often that’s going to fall over, you‘ll see damping of the potassium channel. What happens then, the nerve cells fire excessively.’
The assistant stared at him.
‘It’s nice when you talk like that,’ she said.
‘They put a control loop in but someone like me can’t unpick it. You hear any voices when this fault happens? Speak in tongues? See anything odd?’
‘Everything I see is odd.’
‘Kv12.2,’ the cutter said, ‘is a very old gene.’
He washed his hands under a tap he had at the back of the store.
‘Even a fish has it. Are you going to kill me?’
‘Not today, hon.’
She left, but almost immediately came back.
‘Hey, look, Tango du Chat is just over the road!’ she said, as if she had only just discovered that fact about the world.
The parlour filled up with her rank smell again. Outside, the sun warmed each shabby frontage, picking out the unlit bar sign across the street — a black and white cat dancing on its hind legs — while two monas in pencil skirts and seamed nylon stockings gossiped at the intersection of Straint and dos Santos; inside, it was matt black walls, dust. There was a smell of stale lipids in the air around the proteome tanks, with their rows of LEDs and torn posters for year-old fights, long-dead fighters. The tailor, rigid with disquiet, looked away from her as hard as he could. His anxiety flipped suddenly into depression. ‘You got Preter Coeur written all through you,’ he said, ‘but no one signed the work. This isn’t something they would do for a sport fighter. There’s military stuff in there too.’
‘So do you want to get a drink sometime, George?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Yes you do,’ the assistant said.
Later, as puzzled by her own motives as anyone else’s, she left him in the bar listening to Edith Bonaventure play the sentimental accordion solo from
The cloudbase was down since lunch, Saudade City afternoon rain coming on. Fifty yards into the gloom, she saw rubble and sagging razor wire. Beyond that the landscape crawled constantly, as if uncomfortable with itself, or as if you were viewing it through water flowing on glass. Further away, you could make out unfamiliar objects being tossed up into the air by a silent but convulsive force. This force, though it had been given many names, was as impossible to understand as the objects themselves, which, scaled in incongruous ways — giant crockery, huge shoes, ornaments and jewellery, bluebirds and rainbows, tiny bridges, tiny ships and tiny public buildings — were so unconstrained by context that they seemed less objects than images, collaged on to a further image of bad weather and ruined landscape. They rose, floated, toppled, thrown up as if by the hands of a gigantic, bad- tempered, invisible child. The assistant shook her head over all this. Cars came and went around her; something big broke the cloud cover and settled near her briefly. (It brought an extra pressure to the air, along with heat, feelings of invasion, the stink of metamaterials and intelligent nanoresins. Then it was gone.) Finally, she started up the car and drove off at walking pace across the cement.
Every afternoon was the same: rickshaws and sedans arrived from all over the city to take part in this drive-in of the Saudade soul. By 3pm the Lots were rammed. A fluttering, soft-focus carnival of mothy adverts filled
